Photograph by Lena Aires / Kintzing
Words by Becca Warner
In Anishinaabemowin, the language of the Anishinaabe people, the word for a running horse is “bebezhigoogzhii.” According to Anishinaabe elder Dr. Shirley Williams, the term translates to “one who runs with one hoof in front of the other” in English. As she tells me this, the static image of a horse in my mind’s eye springs into motion—its power and speed activated by the word’s inference of clipping and clopping. “The word [quite literally] describes how the animal runs, what it does,” Dr. Williams says.
Dr Williams is explaining this to me from her home in Wikwemikong, Manitoulin Island, Ontario. Anishinaabemowin is her first language, and the only language she spoke until attending residential school from the age of 10 where she had to learn English. Since 1986 she has taught Anishinaabemowin to many hundreds of students at Trent University where she holds the title Professor Emeritus, Indigenous Studies.
She spells out the ways that Anishinaabemowin brings its speakers closer to the natural world they inhabit. Its references to time, for example, acknowledge Earth as an ever-changing planet. December is “manidoo-giizisoons” or “little sun,” says Dr. Williams, “because it gets dark at four or five o’clock.”
Life—aliveness—is baked into Anishinaabemowin. It is dominated by verbs, the active ingredients in every language that pulsate with the being and breathing and doing and moving of life. I ask Dr. Williams what the Anishinaabemowin word for “nature” is. Inaadiziwin, she says, which in English means “way of life.” Nature is something lived—not a static noun that refers to someplace separate from the human-built world as is often the case in Western languages. Nature, in Anishinaabemowin, is not confined to a world that exists over there: outside the window, beyond that bend in the road.
It is both obvious and easy to forget that the words we use to describe the world around us reveal how we relate to it. In Anishinaabe culture, the natural world is active, precious, and has a dignity all its own. Everything that exists in the natural world is a “gift that was given to us, that we need to look after,” Dr. Williams says. A tree is asked its permission before being cut down; water is revered as sacred. Whatever our relationship with the natural world, language can reinforce it—carve it a little deeper, make its edges more pronounced.
This relationship between words, people, and the world we inhabit is what the evolving field of ecolinguistics aims to interrogate. As an academic discipline it was first internationally recognised in the 1990s, but it remains without an agreed-upon definition decades later. Even so, the International Ecolinguistics Association has attempted to describe it as a field that “explores the role of language in the life-sustaining interactions of humans, other species and the physical environment.”
Nature is something lived—not a static noun that refers to someplace separate from the human-built world as is often the case in Western languages.
“It’s not just any old interactions we’re interested in,” says Dr. Arran Stibbe, Professor of Ecological Linguistics at the University of Gloucester. “It’s the life-sustaining ones, the ones that keep life going on the planet.” He looks at any text that reveals something about these interactions—typically adverts, news, reports, textbooks, nature poetry. The goal is to expose what a piece of language is implying about our relationship to nature, and if necessary, to challenge it. Dr. Stibbe’s analysis, as he puts it, “reveals the stories that we live by in unsustainable and unequal civilizations. And where those stories are found to be harmful, [it’s about] search[ing] for new stories to live by.”
Dr. Stibbe’s book, Ecolinguistics: Language, Ecology and the Stories We Live By, and free online course are full of real-life examples: of economics textbooks that describe people as “consumers” who are driven by an insatiable need to buy; the government documents that position cows and horses as “units” as though they are as lifeless as a kitchen cupboard; and the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals that refer to vibrant, life-rich seas and oceans as “marine resources.” Our word choices, Dr. Stibbe argues, reveal the metaphors that can shape our thought—that nature is a machine, a storehouse, a competition. In such contexts, language implies that the natural world is something that exists only to be counted up and exploited, and reveals that colonial, Western cultures “don’t see the value like we do,” Dr. Williams says. “They just use nature.”
Though the impact of language on our worldview is hard to measure, research has shown that the words we hear can prime us to relate to our surroundings in very specific ways. One experiment by Northwestern University has shown that when a task was described to a group of people as a “Consumer Reaction Task,” they went on to conserve less water in a resource management game and felt less personal responsibility for environmental problems than when the task was described as a “Citizen Reaction Task.” Another research study asked participants to unscramble sentences that were either about economics, like “continues economy growing our,” or about natural topics, such as “green tree was a.” They were then asked to write letters giving bad news to an employee. Researchers analyzed their letters to assess how much concern and compassion they expressed towards the letter’s recipient. Those who had been given the sentences about economics showed significantly lower levels of compassion, suggesting that merely being exposed to the language of economics can negatively impact how we treat others.
Analyzing the language we use to describe climate change is particularly urgent, according to Dr. Stibbe, as our words directly influence how we tackle it. For example, the neutral-sounding term “anthropogenic climate change” collapses human responsibility for the climate crisis into a neat, innocuous noun. “There’s no actual agents doing anything,” Dr. Stibbe says. “Certainly, nobody is doing anything immoral, or bad. [The term implies that] nobody does anything at all. It just happens.”
These linguistic patterns and metaphors are so entrenched in our everyday language that they seem almost invisible. So, when language tells a different story, it all but jumps off the page.
Sumaúma, a platform for journalism written from and about the Amazon rainforest, shows the power of word choice in environmental storytelling. Launched in 2022 by Eliane Brum and Jonathan Watts, two award-winning journalists with experience writing for El País and The Guardian, it exposes the destruction and injustices happening every day in the Amazon. And it does so by using language that decenters human perspectives and experiences, toppling us from our self-proclaimed position of superiority to show the Earth through nature’s eyes.
It is both obvious and easy to forget that the words we use to describe the world around us reveal how we relate to it.
Among the first articles published by Sumaúma was a piece by Davi Kopenawa Yanomami, a prominent shaman and leader of the Yanomami people, who describes the “wounds” inflicted on the forest by miners. Another article reports on the acceleration of deforestation in Brazil, and describes trees that are not merely “felled”—but “killed.” The numbers of trees lost are “numbers of lives,” and the final figure is described as a “death toll.” Meanwhile, in Sumaúma’s “more-than-human” series, we are told the story of H.s., the “tree-person, house-tree, whose existence was cut short by human greed.” H.s. is referred to as “she,” and was “born as a seed” before growing up to experience the “curious sensation” of the feet of a thousand ants and the “internal simmering” of a hormone rush. It is not long before she is killed by the “commodity-man.”
“We believe we need other kinds of language if we want to have any chance for life on this planet,” says Sumaúma founder Eliane Brum. “It’s very obvious, but unfortunately not understood as obvious, that we can’t escape the abyss of the climate emergency using [colonial, Western] language.” A common example, she says, is language that casts the Amazon as an economic resource. Another—which is all too familiar in Brazil—is framing the cutting down of trees as “cleaning” or “limpeza” in Portuguese.
For all its linguistic experimentation, Sumaúma’s journalism is no less committed to the truth than any other investigative platform. “We keep the good things from traditional journalism,” Brum says. “Our investigations are very rigorous, we have fact checks, we have reviews, our translations are done by professional translators.”
Reading Sumaúma can feel like reading poetry, yet it remains a home for facts. This unification challenges so much of how the West views objectivity and the quest for “truth.” The notion that there is just one way to “know” the world is, according to Dr. Stibbe, entrenched in Western science. “We think that the only way to be scientific is with this empiricist, logical positivist paradigm,” says Dr. Stibbe. “And that anything which doesn’t do that is somehow inferior, and somehow can’t get anywhere near the truth. But that is just one form of science—we need to expand our idea of what science is.”
Our words have a power that many of us are not yet using. They can paint the natural world as sensing, singing, worthy of life; and they can remind us that we are animals within it, grateful recipients of its gifts, who can offer something in return.
In an ideal world, we might try to build aliveness back into the very bones of colonial languages—to come up with words that set a horse in hard-hooved motion or speak of time by referencing our sun. But while languages are flexible, their fundamentals aren’t easy to shift. So instead, and as Sumaúma has shown, our words can tell new stories using the tools available to us in Western languages—limiting though they may sometimes be.
We can start by noticing the distance and domination held within the words we hear, and be deliberate about the vocabulary we use; the verbs we choose; and the agency we assign to human and more-than-human beings. This is but one way of shaping our language in urgent times—and changing the stories we are living by.
Join our membership community. Support our work, receive a complimentary subscription to Atmos Magazine, and more.
Why We Need New Words for Nature
